October 13, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- On the front page of a prominent newspaper the news
is grim: a Middle Eastern country run by a ruthless dictatorial
regime has been secretly developing “weapons of mass
destruction.” While in public they deny it, in their underground
labs their scientists are busy, cooking up a radioactive horror
that will soon be visited upon the world — that is, unless we
act.

How do we
know this? An exile group of so-called “freedom-fighters” has
made this “intelligence” available to a reporter for a
widely-read US newspaper, which splashes this scoop all over its
front pages.

I could be
talking about the year 2002 — or 2012, with only difference
being the names of the target countries. We have been down this
road before

Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now saying it is only a
matter of
a year or so before Iran is ready to join the nuclear club —
of course, he said the
same thing last year, and the year before, and the year
before that.

Adding to
our sense of deja-vu, we have an Iranian version of the
Iraqi National Congress exile group providing the same
quality of “intelligence”: the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK),
or Peoples’ Warriors, a weird
Marxist-Islamic cult which once
served Saddam Hussein and was given a base in Iraq to
conduct terrorist activities in Iran. When the southern Shi’ites
rose against Saddam in the 1990s, Saddam called in these
mercenaries to
slaughter the ill-armed rebels. The War Party won a big
victory the other day when Hillary Clinton announced the MEK had
been
taken off the official list of designated terrorist groups.
They have been a constant
source of
phony “evidence”
that Iran is secretly working on nuclear weapons

Hardly a
day goes by without some
supposedly sensational revelation or claim about Iran’s
alleged “weapons of mass destruction.” It seems like only
yesterday, however, that we were seeing exactly the same
headlines, and the same articles, only this time it is Iran
instead of Iraq that stands accused. Back in 2002, it was
a series of pieces bylined by a New York Times
reporter,
Judith Miller — whose name has become virtually synonymous
with deception. Ms. Miller was being fed her information by
Chalabi’s group, via her close connections to the
administration, and in particular to a group of political
operatives deemed
the
neoconservatives.

This was —
is — a
small but highly influential coterie of what used to be
called cold war liberals, whose views were shaped by
migratory
ex-Trotskyites with a bone to pick with Stalin. Not your run
of the mill European-style Social Democrats, mind you, but
militant interventionists with a vision of a world reshaped by
American military power. Or, as one neocon writing in a
prominent foreign policy journal put it: the goal of US foreign
policy ought to be “benevolent
global hegemony” — as opposed, one must assume, to the
malevolent global hegemony dreamed of by Communists,
national socialists, and other villains throughout history.

The fabled
journey of the neocons from far left to far right has been
celebrated in story and song, and there is no need to go into
all the gory details here: we’ve heard it all before — in a PBS
documentary, “Arguing the
World,” and in numerous
memoirs by the participants. Yet this famous hegira didn’t
take them anywhere: it was a journey standing still. For they
had simply transferred their allegiance from the Soviet Union to
the United States without changing the basic
underlying assumptions of their radical universalism:
instead of a world communist revolution as advocated by Leon
Trotsky and his followers, these disillusioned Marxists now
dreamed of a “global
democratic revolution,” as one of George W. Bush’s
speechwriters
put it in a presidential oration celebrating the anniversary
of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Having
walked out of the Democratic party, disgusted with the
alleged “pacifism” of George McGovern, these Scoop Jackson
Democrats wound up in the Republican party just as the Reagan
Revolution, so-called, was picking up steam. When Reagan went to
Washington, the neocons followed in his wake, and wound up
ensconced in the
National
Endowment for Democracy, which was founded with them in
mind. There Reagan’s advisers could keep an eye on them, while
they stayed largely out of sight of the general public.

From a
small coterie of social democratic intellectuals, the neocons
soon
branched out and established a Washington network that tied
them into the right-wing cold war coalition of
social conservatives,
free market types, and
professional anti-communists. The neocons fit neatly into
the latter category, but were never quite comfortable with the
other members of the coalition. Some of them remained
socialists, or at least social democrats of one sort or another,
and as far as capitalism was concerned, they could only give it
two cheers, at the most — as Irving Kristol put it in the
title of one of his books. When it came to domestic issues, the
neocons were all over the map, from
Sidney
Hook — the quintessential New York intellectual — who
remained a socialist until his dying day, to
Irving Kristol, a former Trotksyist who wound up founding a
veritable dynasty based on the ideological assumptions to be
found in the Republican party platform.

What
unified them, and defined them as a cohesive group, was a
fanatical hatred of Stalinism and their dedication to the idea
of spreading democracy — at gunpoint, if necessary — throughout
the world. During the cold war, the CIA
made
use of them as the US sought to counter Soviet influence on
the international left. Having
displaced the older generation of conservatives, who were
derided as “isolationists,” these New Conservatives — or
neoconservatives, as they came to be known — came to dominate
the American right-wing and soon
seized
control of the philanthropic foundations that poured money
into right-wing causes.

As the
cold war ended, however, they saw their influence waning. When
Reagan met with Gorbachev and signed a treaty limiting
long-range missiles based in Europe, they
accused the man who had coined the phrase “evil empire” with
selling out to the commies and leaving the US defenseless
against the Kremlin. They failed to understand what was
happening when the Soviet colossus began to crack because they
never “got it” that communism’s biggest enemies were its own
internal contradictions.

With the
fall of Communism, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the
professional anti-communists were
out of work. Suddenly there was a big hole in their
worldview: the rationalization for our interventionist foreign
policy had disappeared almost overnight. Worse, from their point
of view, the Republicans were drifting back to their
“isolationist” roots. When, during the Clinton administration,
the Republicans in Congress
threatened to pull the funding from our military adventure
in Kosovo, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard,
threatened
to walk out of the Republican party.

They
went to
Washington with a plan:
invade and
subjugate Iraq. They had found a new enemy to take the place
of the Kremlin, and it wasn’t just the Iraq dictator — although
Saddam was their
initial target — but the entire Muslim world, which they
determined had to be transformed. The “swamp,” they averred, had
to be “drained.”
In their view, the entire Arab world had been deformed and kept
back from achieving “modernity” due to certain characteristics
of what
they called the “Arab mind” — deformations that could be
traced back to the all-pervasive influence of Islam on the
development of Arab civilization.

The stage
was set for the disaster that was about to unfold….

It’s
All About Israel - Part II of “Roots of the Iranian ‘Crisis’”

It was and
is a matter of high principle for the neoconservatives that the
US unconditionally support Israel in its struggle against the
Arab world. Disputing the neocons’ claim to the mantle of
Wilsonianism,
Michael Lind described this odd nexus of radical
universalism and ethno-nationalism as “Trotsky’s theory of the
permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of
Zionism,” adding: “Genuine American Wilsonians believe in
self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.”

Saddam
Hussein, you’ll recall, had been offering bounties for suicide
bombers, at least according to
the
propaganda we heard, and — alongside the
contention that he was also developing nuclear weapons —
this was the pitch
the neocons,
and
the Israel lobby, gave in public to justify the invasion.
Yet there was another layer of rationalization which went
largely undetected in America, and the argument was contained in
a paper prepared for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, in 1996, under the auspices of the Israeli Institute
for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, which had
organized a “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.”
The paper was shaped by a series of seminars in which several
figures who would figure prominently in the administration of
George W. Bush participated, including
Richard Perle,
Douglas Feith,
David
Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser. Entitled “A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the
proposal proffered by these future American policymakers urged
Netanyahu to undertake a long-term project to break Israel out
of its geographic and demographic boundaries and engage in a
campaign of “regime change” in the Middle East. To the incoming
Prime Minister, who had upended the long rule of the Israeli
Labor Party, they gave the following advice: ditch the peace
process, and make a “clean break” with the policy of appeasing
both the Palestinians and the United States. Stand
up to Uncle Sam, insist on mutuality, build up support for
Israeli objectives in the US Congress, and go on the offensive
against the enemies of the Jewish state:

“Israel
can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey
and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back
Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from
power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its
own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”

The entire
regime change operation we are seeing unfold in the Middle East
is a veritable laundry list of neoconservative goals as outlined
in the “Clean Break” document, as well as in the agenda of
the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Bill
Kristol’s vehicle for injecting a strong dose of interventionism
into the incoming Bush administration. Aside from calling for
regime change in practically every Middle Eastern state — all
this prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — PNAC’s proposal for
tripling the military budget was prefaced by a yearning for “a
new Pearl Harbor,” which would wake the American people up to
the imperative of American military supremacy at any cost.

The
neocons
got their Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001, and they were
more than ready to take
full advantage of the opportunity to implement their agenda
of
permanent war. While the administration made a
half-hearted attempt to capture Osama bin Laden they failed
to corner him in Afghanistan, and the top leadership slipped
through the American dragnet with the
help
of its Taliban allies. This, however, didn’t really concern the
neocons all that much: Paul Wolfowitz and others were
arguing inside the administration that the real enemy was in
Baghdad. After the preliminaries in Afghanistan, they turned
their sights on the real object of their war-lust: Iraq.

The “Clean
Break” scenario envisioned the overthrow of Iraq’s Ba’athist
regime as a prerequisite for Israel’s success, and
the Israel lobby, in concert with
the
neoconservatives, played a key role in dragging us into that
disastrous war of aggression. Yet that was just the beginning of
the road they wanted to take us on, and we are halfway down it
already. As Ariel Sharon told a delegation of American
congressmen in 2003, after Iraq must come
Iran, Libya, and Syria:

“These are
irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass
destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model
will make that easier to achieve," said the Prime Minister to
his guests, rather like a commander issuing orders to his
foot-soldiers. While noting that Israel was not itself at war
with Iraq, he went on to say that “the American action is of
vital importance.”

Of course
it was, but as far as the Israelis and their American amen
corner were concerned, it was to be just the beginning.

The
Israelization of American foreign policy under George W.
Bush was a policy consciously promoted by the neoconservatives
from their well-situated perch at the heights of the national
security apparatus. The progenitors of the “Clean Break”
scenario saw the Israeli state facing a terminal crisis: the
Jewish state, in their view, was suffering from an “exhaustion”
that could lead to extinction. The idea was to break with the
idea of “containment” and go for a policy of preemption. As the
“Clean Break” document put it:

“Notable Arab intellectuals have written extensively on their
perception of Israel’s floundering and loss of national
identity. This perception has invited attack, blocked Israel
from achieving true peace, and offered hope for those who would
destroy Israel. The previous strategy, therefore, was leading
the Middle East toward another Arab-Israeli war. Israel’s new
agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which
assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by
reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than
retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation
without response.”

This
doctrine of preemption came to be known as the
Bush
Doctrine, but it really ought to be called the Sharon-Bush
Doctrine, given its true origins. When George W. Bush declared
that the United States has the “right,” and even
the obligation, to attack any nation on earth, on the
grounds that the target poses a potential threat to US
interests, he was merely echoing what had by that time already
become official Israeli policy. This policy was given free rein
in a whole series of wars, aside from the permanent state of war
prevailing in the occupied territories of Palestine: two
invasions of
Lebanon, and, today,
terrorist attacks inside Iran carried out by Israeli
intelligence agencies in cooperation with their proxies, such as
the
Mujahideen Khalq. The ultimate example of preemption would
be an attack on Iran — and here we see a real conflict
developing between the Obama administration and Netanyahu’s
government.

The
Israeli position on Iran is an application of the Bush Doctrine
taken to its logical extreme. While the American intelligence
community
is clear that the Iranians abandoned their embryonic nuclear
weapons program in 2003, and all subsequent “evidence” of a
viable Iranian nuke in the making has turned out to be either
forgeries or pre-2003 materials, Netanyahu gets around this
by upping the ante. The danger, he says, is that the Iranians
will achieve the
capacity to put together a nuclear weapon on very short
notice. The Romney campaign, taking its cues from Tel Aviv, has
echoed this escalation of Israeli demands, with the formulation
that they don’t want Tehran “one
turn of the screwdriver away” from acquiring nuclear
weapons.

This is a
technical impossibility, a crude bit of war propaganda that has
no basis in reality: but then again, that’s what war propaganda
usually is — blind assertions meant to evoke an emotional
response rather than one based on reason, or, in this case, on
science. As the
Wilson Center study on the costs and benefits of an attack
on Iran put it, it would take at least two years or more for
Iran to develop a deliverable nuclear warhead — and the effort
would be detected long before that.

In short,
the ticking time bomb scenario described by Netanyahu and his
American co-thinkers is pure nonsense: in no sense could the
Iranians ever be “one turn of the screwdriver away” from nuking
Israel. Even given the doctrine of preemption, in light of these
facts the justification for war simply does not exist. Netanyahu
and his defense minister claim Israel faces an “existential”
crisis, nothing less than the prospect of a
second Holocaust. Yet there are no facts to back up this
assertion: it is simply an emotional appeal. Something else is
at work here other than fear of a genuine threat, and it is
quite simply politics — that is, the internal politics of
Israel, and also of the United States.

Objectively, there is no threat to Israel, or to the West,
emanating from Iran: armed with
nuclear
weapons, and so far
advanced militarily over its neighbors that the distance
between them can only be measured in light years, Israel has no
real reason to fear an attack that is not forthcoming in any
event. The whole thing is manufactured by politicians who have
but one goal in mind: to stay in power.

Meir
Dagan, former head of the Mossad,
says the idea of a preemptive attack on Iran is “the
stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” and inside Israel support for
Netanyahu’s gambit is
far from solid.
Shimon Peres, one of the last of the old-style (i.e.
rational) Israeli leaders, recently went on television to
expressly dissent from Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric and to
give support to President Obama as a reliable ally.

What’s
interesting is that the rhetoric coming from Netanyahu and his
defense minister, Ehud Barak, has a distinctly anti-American
strain. As Barak
put it, in arguing for a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran:

“Ronald Reagan did not want to see a nuclear Pakistan, but
Pakistan did go nuclear. Bill Clinton did not want to see a
nuclear North Korea, but North Korea went nuclear.”

“If Israel forgoes the chance to act and it becomes clear that
it no longer has the power to act, the likelihood of an American
action will decrease… We cannot wait to discover one morning
that we relied on the Americans but were fooled because the
Americans didn’t act in the end…. Israel will do what it has to
do.”

Barak’s
message is all too clear: the Americans are mercurial, and
weak-willed — they can’t be counted on, and besides we have to
do what we have to do. This is the spirit and letter of the
“Clean Break” document, which decried US “intervention” in
Israel’s internal affairs, and it is the language of the extreme
nationalists, such as
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who once advocated
bombing the Aswan dam and is a former bouncer in a bar. His
extremist right-wing party advocates a “Greater Israel,” and is
supported by the “settler” movement — violent fanatics who want
to create a Greater Israel based on their interpretation of the
Bible.

In the
context of growing extremism infecting the Israeli body politic,
a politician like Netanyahu is considered a centrist. To his
right are even more anti-American ultra-nationalists, and this
movement is growing. In order to accommodate it, and contain it
within the confines of his own party, Netanyahu has had to move
in an even more extreme direction, even going so far as to
threaten that Israel will strike Iran on its own, without US
support.

This, of
course, is a policy of de facto blackmail, since any war between
Israel and Iran will
almost inevitably see the Americans dragged in. This has
been the whole Israeli strategy, so far — except that it hasn’t
worked. The President has
steadfastly refused to give in, at least up until this
point. He has even gone so far as to
inform the Iranians in advance that any such attack by
Israeli forces will not have the sanction or support of the US —
and, in such an event, to please refrain from attacking American
targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

In view of
the lack of American support for war, both in Washington and
among the American electorate, the persistence of the debate
within Israel over whether they should attack all on their own
is disturbing. Such a scenario could only be disastrous for the
region, and for Israel in particular, as
Gen. Dempsey, head of the US joint chiefs of staff, has
recently made plain. The Israeli defense and intelligence
establishment has been saying
the same thing, and still Netanyahu and Barak
continue to talk about it as if it were a real option.

While
Netanyahu is bound to be deterred by the cold reception this
idea has received in Washington, in this context we have to ask
ourselves a sobering question: will
Avigdor Lieberman’s finger some day be on Israel’s nuclear
trigger? This is a question the Iranians, and others in the
region, have no doubt asked themselves. That it is even a
possibility is profoundly unsettling — and this, not the
prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, is the source of the real
danger looming over the Middle East.

Israel’s
nuclear monopoly in the region is the real issue at hand, and it
is one the Israelis have not had to face. It is known the
Israelis possess
at least two-hundred warheads. Their policy is one of
“nuclear ambiguity,” neither confirming nor denying the
existence of their deadly arsenal. Unlike Iran, they have
refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT),
and inspections of their nuclear facilities are therefore out of
the question.

Iran, on
the other hand, regularly submits to a
tight schedule of inspections from the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), which would soon discover any
weaponization procedures in progress. Israel’s contemptuous
attitude toward the international community is given a free pass
by the US and its allies, while the Iranians are subjected to
crippling sanctions and an international campaign of
vilification on the mere suspicion that they might one day have
the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. To call this a double
standard is to understate the case.

The
destabilizing effects of Israel’s nuclear monopoly are a major
cause of regional tensions — and the entire basis for assuming
Iran has nuclear ambitions above and beyond its stated intention
of harnessing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. One of the
arguments against containing Iran, as opposed to taking the
military option, is that the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal by
Tehran will spark a
dangerous arms race throughout the region. Yet this is
disproved by the existence of Israel’s own arsenal, which has
sparked no such race — even though the Jewish state’s Muslim
neighbors have ample reason to believe the Israelis could
conceivably launch a first strike on them. This, after all, is
the essence of the doctrine of preemption, which the Israelis
have embraced.

While
there is zero evidence the Iranians have restarted their nuclear
weapons program, could one blame them if they did? How else
could they possibly hope to deter an Israeli first strike? In a
2008 op-ed piece in the New York Times, the noted Israeli
historian Benny Morris
wrote:

“Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and
suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could
hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy
their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands
of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the
alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.”

An Israeli
nuclear strike at Iran is not inconceivable: indeed, it is all
too conceivable. So who are the real aggressors in the Middle
East?

The
Israel Lobby and the Road to War - Part III of "Roots of the
Iranian ‘crisis’"

Israel is
like a spoiled child who has grown stronger, more willful, and
outright dangerous under the nurturing care of its US parent – a
parent who has lost all authority and can no longer restrain its
juvenile delinquent progeny. The US-Israeli "special
relationship" has
destabilized the Middle East and made war much more likely
than it would be otherwise. Israel can act in the knowledge that
there will be no consequences for its actions, that it will not
be held accountable or blamed – in public – in any way for what
follows.

This, in
turn, has energized extremist movements inside Israel, who
demand more and yet more of the United States – and come to
resent Uncle Sam for supposedly restraining the Israelis
from achieving what they believe is their just due. The response
is very far from gratitude, if we take Netanyahu’s recent
behavior as indicative. We pour
billions every year into Israel, with economic and military
aid, and with Congress in their back pocket no American
president dares threaten them with an aid cutoff. The result is
that we have created – and empowered – a monster, one that may
one day turn on us.

Indeed,
Israel has already turned on us if we define that as
brazen interference in American politics. The Israel lobby,
which wields plenty of money and political clout, has so
distorted the national discourse on foreign policy issues that
it is no longer possible for any politician to challenge the
course we have taken.

Defenders
of the Israel lobby say this is because the American people
support Israel, but the truth is far more prosaic. In reality,
most Americans have no opinion about who is right and who is
wrong in the Middle East: they are
neutral when it comes to siding with the Israelis or the
Palestinians, and would prefer that the US government refrain
from taking sides. But they don’t feel very passionately about
it. On the other hand, Israel’s supporters do feel
passionately, and the lopsided congressional support for Israel
– even when it’s
against the interests of the United States – is
the result of a passionate minority’s efforts. If there was
a national plebiscite on US aid to Israel,
you can bet there would be no more goodies forthcoming from
Washington – not just to Israel, but to anyone.

No matter
what the "Clean
Break" document aspires to, Israel’s whole survival strategy
has always been to rely on aid from the outside: without the
billions that flow from the US Treasury into Israeli coffers,
the entire Zionist project would have failed long ago. It has
been kept on life support all these years by money from abroad,
and by the hopes of the Israeli leadership that more Jews will
emigrate to the Promised Land. The main problem, however, is
that American Jews are so thoroughly assimilated that the idea
of taking up residence in Israel never occurs to them: for
American Jews,
America is the Promised Land. Aside from that, the
appeal of moving to a country that sees itself as besieged – and
whose leaders every day assert that they are sitting on the edge
of a
second Holocaust – is necessarily quite limited.

To make
matters worse, the
younger generation of American Jews increasingly does not
identify with Israel, at least not to the degree their mothers
and fathers did. Netanyahu’s
barely disguised support for Mitt Romney in the US
presidential election is not helping the Republicans much with
that particular constituency: instead, it is garnering support
from born again Christians of the
dispensationalist school,
who believe a war in the Middle East involving Israel, the
United States, and Iran, will be the fulfillment of biblical
prophecy and hasten the Second Coming. These are the people who
write and call Congress whenever the administration defies
one of Netanyahu’s whims.

The irony
here is that these far right-wing crazies also believe the Jews
will convert to Christianity when Armageddon comes – and that
those who don’t
will burn in
Hell. Yet the Israel lobby doesn’t hesitate to use these
folks in order to generate support for Israeli government
policies: their leader, the
Rev. John Hagee, has been a
featured speaker at the national conference of the
America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he
fulminated against the "forces of Satan" who are supposedly
conspiring to bring Israel down.

Yes,
Israel has enemies, but these days it is it’s own worst enemy.
The other day I saw a video of an Israeli army soldier
bashing a Palestinian teenager’s head against the stone
pavement of the Al-Aqsa mosque. I saw Muslim worshippers driven
out in response to a demonstration by Israeli extremists
affiliated with the "settler" movement. And it isn’t just
Palestinians, although they bear the great brunt of this
treatment – it’s Christians in Jerusalem and elsewhere who are
being
pushed out by an increasingly aggressive and
xenophobic spirit within Israel, a toxic mix of religious
fundamentalism and racism. There is a movement afoot in Israel
that campaigns for expelling all Arabs from the land of Israel.
In every society, of course, there is a fringe element, but in
the Israel of today they are in the government.

There is,
in short, an incipient
fascist movement that is gaining ground by the day in the
one country on earth where one would least expect such a
phenomenon to arise. Yet history is replete with these tragic
ironies, and if we have to witness the rise of the Jewish
equivalent of Hitler then apparently we are to be spared
nothing.

When
talking about why we are
targeting Iran, and why we’re seeing such a relentless wave
of war propaganda calling for an attack, we have to talk about
Israel, because in the end that’s what it’s all about. We are
being asked, in a rather peremptory tone, to go to war for
Israel’s sake. I have already
demonstrated that Israel’s alleged "existential crisis" is
nothing but
hysterics on the part of Israel’s leaders, but let’s leave
that aside for the moment and ask a more fundamental question:
where do Israel’s interests end and America’s begin, or is there
no daylight between the two?

During the
cold war, Israel was a mixed case: a reliable ally whose
friendship cost us support in the Arab world and gave the
Soviets a wedge to extend their influence. Now that we are
fighting an
apparently
eternal "war on terrorism," Israel has become an unmitigated
liability. If we must fight a war against over a billion
Muslims, then we will surely lose: the only hope is to somehow
split the Muslim world, and rally the moderates against the
radical Islamists of bin Laden’s sort.

Now, I’m
not saying this is what I’m advocating: I am merely
describing the objective circumstances that drive US policy, and
this goes for both the present and the previous administration.

The Obama
administration has taken this Muslim-centric strategy one step
further, however, and is
openly allying with what can only be described as radical
Islamists one step removed from al-Qaeda. The idea is to co-opt
and defuse Islamist movements which Washington sees as the
inevitable inheritors of the decaying Sunni monarchies that are
bound to fall sooner rather than later.

The Bush
administration and its neoconservative
cheerleaders thrilled to the idea that the "liberation" of
Iraq would spark democratic revolutions throughout the region.
What happened, instead, is that it sparked revolutions against
US-supported dictators like Hosni Mubarak that have little to do
with liberal democracy as we know it in the West. Instead, what
we see is the rise of a most illiberal democracy, and not
only in Egypt. Our policymakers envision the Turkification of
the Middle East – the creation of moderate Islamist governments
with military and economic ties to the West. But of course
central planning from Washington
doesn’t work any better when it comes to foreign policy than
it does in domestic policy. We saw the real world results of
this policy in Benghazi.

On the
other hand, the Israelis have a far different vision,
exemplified by Netanyahu’s recent
speech to the United Nations in which he held up Israel as
the great defender of "modernity" against the savage hordes.
It’s the new public face of Israel:
subway posters that urge us to "support the civilized man"
against the "savage." Aside from being laughably untrue – Israel
is no less threatened by a rising religious fundamentalism than
its neighbors, with fanatic "settlers" running wild and even
challenging the IDF – this line of argument underscores
Israel’s growing isolation on the world stage, and its slide
into a frightening extremism. Netanyahu’s Manichean view of
Israel fighting virtually alone against an array of enemies –
and the broken promises of its less than reliable friends –
serves Netanyahu and his party well.

According
to my theory of international relations, which I call "libertarian
realism," this is the origin of all foreign policy
decisions by the leaders of nations: these decisions, like all
other political decisions, are made in order to preserve and
extend the power, wealth, and prestige of these leaders and
their supporters. Therefore such questions as whether or not
Iran really is intent on building nuclear weapons and deploying
them against Israel are irrelevant. Objective facts don’t enter
into the equation: it’s all about creating a narrative suitable
for domestic consumption.

The
problem for Netanyahu is that his narrative necessarily collides
with Washington’s current view of US interests in the region.
The resulting din can be heard in the raised voices of both US
and Israeli leaders as the debate goes public during a
presidential election year. Netanyahu’s
clear preference for Romney is a brazen intervention in US
politics of the sort that no previous Israeli leader has ever
dared attempt. The
fuss about meeting Netanyahu at the UN, the demand for a "red
line," and Netanyahu’s
preexisting personal relationship with Romney aren’t the
only evidences of Netanyahu’s sympathies. Both the Israeli
leader and the Republican nominee share a major donor in common:
Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who had
pledged to spend $100 million to defeat President Obama, and
has spent more than that to subsidize a
free Israeli newspaper that is a veritable Netanyahu
campaign organ. As David Andrew Weinberg pointed out in the
Christian Science Monitor, Netanyahu has taken to the US
airwaves to
chastise the White House for its lack of support:

"Netanyahu’s recent sound bites on Iran are already being
featured in a million-dollar ad buy attacking Obama in Florida.
The group distributing this ad, Secure America Now, is founded
by a Republican strategist notorious for having a direct line to
the prime minister, so Netanyahu was probably aware of how such
remarks would be utilized by American conservatives."

Such
interference in American elections by a foreign power is
intolerable. Too bad the Obama administration doesn’t have the
courage to name what is happening and call out Netanyahu. The
American people would welcome it. However, I’m afraid the Israel
lobby is
just as powerful in the Democratic party as it is among the
Republicans, and so we’ll see none of that.

This is
why Iran has been chosen as the latest target: because the
powerful lobby of a foreign government is pulling out all the
stops in a bid to drag us into a ruinous war. That such a
conflict would benefit Israel in the long run, or even in the
short term, is a highly dubious proposition. While the largely
mythical threat of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel might
dissipate, for a while at least, the benefits of dispelling a
potential danger are far outweighed by the near certain danger
of worldwide economic collapse. With the price of oil
skyrocketing to unprecedented heights, world markets already
reeling from the global recession would be knocked for a loop by
the oil shock. The effects would be felt not only here in the US
but also in Israel, where protests over rising prices and
austerity budgets are already erupting. If you thought the crash
of ’08 was a big deal, just wait until the prospect of war
triggers an economic meltdown that makes ’08 look like a blip on
the screen.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a
senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a
contributing editor at The
American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for
Chronicles. He is the author of
Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the
Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies,
1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
[Prometheus Books, 2000].

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